A new tasting menu restaurant called Punk Noir opens June 2 in Dallas’ Design District at 139 Turtle Creek Blvd. The concept is owned by Dallas natives John McKeel and his sons Cole and Clay, and it’s being run in the kitchen by James Beard Award–winning Chef RJ Cooper, who built his reputation at Rogue 24 in Washington, D.C. and a handful of acclaimed Nashville projects before landing here.
The format is 20 courses, 26 seats per seating, two to three seatings a night. The room is 7,800 square feet and designed to move guests through multiple spaces across the evening — a lounge with a graffiti mural by local artist Michael Shellis, a communal dining room with projection-mapped visuals, an open kitchen where Cooper presents courses directly, and a more formal dining room with chandeliers and oversized canvas paintings. It’s theatrical by design, and that seems to be the point.
The menu changes regularly but follows a structure Cooper calls a sensory narrative. Early courses run through land and sea — camote morado with huitlacoche, blue crab with seaweed and calamansi, scallop with turmeric and Kaluga caviar, turbot with mussel and plankton. The middle of the meal moves into richer territory with Peking duck and Australian wagyu. It closes with things like onion with Amur caviar and white chocolate with kombu, which either sounds strange or exactly right depending on how you feel about that kind of thing. Chef de Cuisine Jay Vopatek, formerly of Rye, and Pastry Chef Rachel Maykut, known for her work at Uchi, are running the supporting programs.
The front-of-house Noir Lounge seats 64 and offers a separate cocktail tasting menu and lighter food options for people who want the room without the full commitment. Bar manager Shane Scully is running a lower-ABV cocktail progression that moves through different formats — clarified, frozen, aerated, encapsulated — which sounds like it belongs at the table as much as anything coming out of the kitchen.
The tasting menu is $295 per person. Reservations at exploretock.com/punk-noir.
